The 12-month phase 1 contract was received from DARPA. The initial stage of the program was aimed at developing a high-efficiency bacterial-expression system using Dowpharma’s Pfenex Expression Technology™ in conjunction with Xcellerex’ single-use FlexFactory platform to grow production strains to high cell densities and to purify the model vaccine and antibody.

The current effort will work to increase the productivity and speed of process optimization, including demonstration of scale-up and improved economics. This will include optimizing host strains and a manufacturing process required to increase the yield of vaccines and mAbs by 10-fold over that achieved in phase 1 with the added objective of increasing product quality.

Xcellerex’ microbial PDMax™ high-speed process development technology is also used in the collaboration along with deltaDOT’s Peregrine® label-free, CE-based analytical technology. The team is guided by BioPharm Services’ systems integration, data management/process economics, and simulated event-modeling technology.